Validating my struggle, Part 1

I have often been put in situations that make me feel guilty for being where I am in life right now. Contrary to how I may occasionally portray it in casual conversation, my childhood was pretty freaking great. My parents loved my sister and I deeply and supported us wholeheartedly. I never wanted for anything I needed and was rarely if ever denied the chance to experience things like school trips or cool, not-inexpensive things on the weekends.

I was blessed to go to college right out of high school. My parents paid my tuition for my first year and allowed me to live at home for free. I only moved out when I determined that I had to (wanted to) live on my own. The support didn’t end at that point. Through all of my ups and downs, self-generated or otherwise my family and friends never gave up on me and never abandoned me.

These factors coupled with a few others feed into my desire to continuously legitimize my struggles with life and/or addiction in my own mind. You can imagine how it felt inside my mind to be the only “college boy” in the program during my month in treatment. I wasn’t coming from or going directly to lockup around my stint and I’d never lived on the street. I never had a gun held to my head, nor had I ever done the same to anyone else (I’ve never even carried or fired a pistol). I wasn’t a gangster or anyone with much of a reputation outside of that of being a guy that drank and used a LOT, had a pretty bad temper and didn’t seem to be afraid of much.

Let’s look at this objectively: my rock bottom came after losing a $39,000 a year salaried office job as an administrative departmental director at a technical college. I wasn’t stuck living under a bridge and I wasn’t wondering where I would find my next meal. I hadn’t destroyed a marriage or alienated my children. I didn’t OD and wake up in the hospital.

I haven’t relapsed and at no point have I ever lost everything. Even the people who I alienated in my active addiction never got so pushed away that they didn’t remain in my life. All of these seemingly “not so bad” factors have led me to struggle with the legitimacy of my story. In a world where each time in jail is another notch on the gunbelt mine is relatively unscathed. I often shy away from speaking at meetings because of it; how can people fresh out of the gutter relate to a guy who had a pretty good life even at the point I hit my rock bottom?

This also leads me to belittling the struggle of others or to “hating on” people with “unearned” money or what I deem to be undeserved fame or notoriety. You see just like anyone else, the easiest way I can refocus my mind from fixating on how relatively “soft” my life history is has been to ridicule someone else for the same thing. Seriously? Am I in the third grade all over again? I despise the mindset that says: “I’ll bring myself up by tearing other people down,” yet within recovery or life in general I revert to this exact line of thinking far too often.